Convert Traffic to Orders: “Snap and buy” will play a key role in future mobile shopping

(Cover photo provided by Rakuten.)

The mobile-using population is expanding, most of the traffic comes from mobile devices, no one knows it better than the owners of internet shop owners. Unfortunately, the viewership is the only thing that grows, “the conversion is missing”(Agarwal 2014).

According to Custora’s survey, the population using mobile (phones and tablets) to visit e-commerce sites hit 20% in 2013.In 2014 Q1, among all the devices, mobile phone users occupied 24.5% of the total views, tablet 12.4%, making up 37% of the total visits to e-commerce sites came from mobile devices.

Despite the frequency of e-commerce browsing on mobile devices has increased, the conversion rate remains low compared to desktop computer.

According to the conversion rates (number of goal achievements/visitors), the desktop computer still obtains the highest conversion rate compared to mobile phones and tablets, performances are 4.3%, 1.4% and 2.8% respectively.

Mobile device brings infinite possibility to e-commerce industry, marketing tricks had never been this flexible and diverse:sending instant coupons through push notifications, lottery games … just to name a few.Be that as it may, all the fun and page views can be pointless if these traits cannot lead to more orders.

Reasons behind the absence

A research conducted by IEK, Industrial Economics and Knowledge, of ITRI reveals that most users think the size of mobile screens are too small; over a quarter of the participants keep their security concern when it comes to mobile shopping.

Up to 48.5% of the participants think the searching function leaves a lot to be desired, regarding the accuracy and convenience, which becomes the main reason why users tend not to shop on mobile devices.

It can be concluded that the greatest barrier on mobile shopping is the user experience failed to make users feel the conveniencethe mobile devices are expected to offer.Oppositely, mobile devices were limited by the size of screens, the deficiency in input method and the imprecise searching tools.

Levering conversion rate

Mobile devices have irreversibly changed our daily lives. How to optimise searching capacity within bounded screen so to enhance the shopping in real-time experience, then, is now the top issue to the eCommerce site owners.

The “snap and buy” mobile shopping experience combining with reality, redirect users to the exact page where they can shop in single click, this latest mobile shopping mode is now on many big e-commerce brands’ agenda, including Taobao and Yahoo!.

Viscovery plays a supportive part in the trend. Offering e-commerce store owners and retailers accurate recognition technology, Viscovery has drawn chain retailers such as Save & Safe, Watsons, Tsannkuen Co., and UDN to partnership, having their customers experience the future e-commerce world ahead of others.

This survey also points out the importance of BigData analysis that help owners to learn more about their consumers, so to have more accurate suggestions.

An online shopping environment that combines visual recognition, leading offline requests to online orders, providing both accurate/ambiguous match suggestions for users based on BigData analysis, is perhaps the key to future success in e-commerce industry.